An All-Ireland bid to stage the 2023 Rugby World Cup will be officially unveiled in Armagh on Friday.

Officials from the Irish Rugby Football Union will join representatives from the Northern Ireland Executive and Irish Government to outline their plans to jointly host the tournament.

Both administrations have been engaged in a preliminary assessment exercise over the last 10 months.

The aim was to weigh up the feasibility of submitting an official bid.

In February, former Irish international Hugo MacNeill was asked to chair the cross-border working group examining the issue of hosting the sport's showpiece event.

As well as the traditional rugby stadiums such as the Aviva in Dublin, the Kingspan at Ravenhill in Belfast and Thomond Park in Limerick, a 2023 World Cup in Ireland would also hope to utilise a number of impressive Gaelic football venues, including the 82,300 capacity Croke Park in Dublin.

The Irish rugby team played their home matches in Croke Park between 2007 and 2010 while the Aviva Stadium was being built on the site of the old Lansdowne Road.

Next year's Rugby World Cup will be hosted by England, with Japan hosting the event in 2019.

Cross border bids to hold sporting events are not unheard of in Ireland and earlier this year cycling's Giro d'Italia held stages on both sides of the border.

In May, current Irish coach Joe Schmidt said an all-Ireland Rugby World Cup could replicate the success of his native New Zealand in its staging of the 2011 tournament.

"You have got the same population and the same kind of energy around sporting occasions and I think you have got the stadia," he said.

“That made me feel very special and underlined to me that Ulster is more than a team, it is a community and a rugby family"Rory Best

UlsterNo9 wrote:The local residents committee at Ravenhill will be loving this. A game every other day for two months.

Besides Cork, Limerick, Belfast and Dublin is there anywhere else that has the transport links, accommodation and stadia to be a World Cup venue?

Is hosting two games in Dublin on a Fri, Sat and Sun feasible.... accommodation would be a nightmare. Belfast certainly wouldn't cope.

My heart says yes my head says

World Cup England , has 13 Stadiums, 11 of those have above 30k capacity with 6 stadium above 50k, with 3 stadiums above 70k, the target for the forthcoming World Cup is ticket sales( exceeding the last WC ) is 2million, so ideally 9 years from now Ireland would want to exceed that, would we have 13 stadiums+ with that capacity. Not going to happen, but a nice damp thought ,

We would need at least 40 world class training facilities for the team bases, maybe a cynical ambitious plan by IRFU to get funding to upgrade club facilities,

“I’m reasonably clear what the end point is, but I need to understand the start point in order to be more definitive as to how long it’s going to take to get there"